June 5, 2019 Arts & Culture Gangster Bedtime Stories By Rich Cohen Photograph of the Navy Street gang in Brooklyn, New York, used as a prosecution exhibit at trial in 1918. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I grew up on gangster stories. While other kids were hearing about the three little pigs and the old woman who lived in a shoe, my father was telling me about the legends of his New York childhood—Pittsburgh Phil Strauss and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, the visionary who put craps up on a table. “The lesson here,” my father said softly as I lay in bed, “is that it was the same game, just played on a different level.” For a kid in the suburbs, these stories were more than stories—they were redbrick stoops, air shafts crossed by clotheslines, alleys, candy stores and subterranean club rooms, apartment houses that, compared to my atomized world of detached single-family living, seemed like paradise—coastal Brooklyn, where the fog bathes everything in a ghostly light and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge vanishes halfway across, like a ladder with its top in the clouds. As soon as I was old enough, I moved to New York. I said I was looking for a job, but really I had come in search of the truth behind my father’s stories. This became my career. Parents: be careful what you tell your children at night. I explored the parts of the city where I knew the old-time gangsters had operated. Little Italy and the Lower East Side, East New York and Brownsville, the piers that had been the heart of the old Fourth Ward. I was consumed by New York history—not the story of marble buildings and glad-handing mayors but the alternate story that ran parallel and beneath: the story of the underworld, its heroes and stool pigeons, founders and visionaries. As my father said, “The same game, just played on a different level.” Read More
June 4, 2019 Redux Redux: A Pin-Cushion with No Pins in It By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Lorrie Moore. Photo: © Linda Nylind. This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking of our feline companions. Read Lorrie Moore’s Art of Fiction interview, as well as Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s short story “Metaphor of the Falling Cat” and Pati Hill’s essay “Cats.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Lorrie Moore, The Art of Fiction No. 167 Issue no. 158 (Spring–Summer 2001) MOORE My editor did suggest that if I were feeling strapped for cash perhaps I should consider entering my cat in the Purina Cat Chow contest. Shortly thereafter, for money reasons indeed, I left New York for good. INTERVIEWER What kind of cat was it? MOORE What kind of cat was it? Well, he was a farm cat from Ithaca, New York. Very beautiful, very intelligent, a certain je ne sais quoi, but in a national competition, believe me, he didn’t have a prayer. Read More
June 4, 2019 First Person On Fasting By Kaveh Akbar Image: Nadja Spiegelman Emerson said, “If you go expressly to look at the moon it becomes tinsel.” He preached self-reliance—the importance of being with yourself in nature—but he also lived with his mother, who cooked for him and cleaned his muddy boots. The new moon at the start of May this year signaled the beginning of Ramazan, which the rest of the world calls Ramadan, which I call Ramadan when I speak with my friends, but which I grew up calling Ramazan because that’s how we say it in Farsi. In Farsi there are four different letters that all make the same z sound and maybe we figured if we didn’t use them enough they’d disappear. This year, for the first time in my life, I have fasted for all of Ramazan. The Quran says during Ramazan you’re supposed to “eat and drink until the white thread of dawn appears to you distinct from the black thread of night.” And then fast until sunset—no food, no drink. The black thread/white thread part fascinates me, eating in the predawn morning until it’s light enough outside to tell the white thread from the black. Nowadays there’s an app called Muslim Pro (a hilarious name) where you enter your location and it tells you exactly what time to stop eating. But I like to imagine a time when someone was sitting outside eating bread and cheese alone in the dark, checking and rechecking their two threads. They’d eat a bit more, yawn a bit, and then, suddenly, rubbing their eyes, they’d catch a gleam of light against the white thread and shout “Stop! Stop!” to their family inside. That’s probably not how it ever worked. Read More
June 4, 2019 Dice Roll Dice Roll: A Gambit for Civil Rights By Michael LaPointe Michael LaPointe’s monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. Original illustration © Ellis Rosen You wouldn’t expect James McMillan to bluff. He once called Lyndon Johnson “the most bigoted bastard that I’ve ever known.” McMillan had a blunt honesty that hampered his success in electoral politics. But in March of 1960, with just ten days before the protest, he was doing his best to keep a poker face. As president of the NAACP in Las Vegas, he’d written a widely publicized letter to the mayor promising a massive protest on the Strip unless segregation ended in the city. At the time, black people were barred from casinos downtown and on the Strip. Yet as the date of the march approached, McMillan surveyed his organizational efforts with dismay. It wasn’t easy to rally people for an event where they faced potential beatings and arrests. “This isn’t going to happen,” he told himself. “These people are not going to march.” The last move remaining was the stone-cold bluff: stare down the Vegas power brokers, some of the most dangerous underworld figures in the country, and hope they folded first. “The only thing that I had going for me was that the caucasians had not faced this type of thing before,” he recalled. “They were afraid.” In the meantime, he was getting death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. His children would answer the phone and be told to expect a bomb. But there was no turning back. McMillan’s gambit would define his life and transform the city of Las Vegas. Read More
June 3, 2019 Arts & Culture Philippe Petit, Artist of Life By Paul Auster In 1982, Paul Auster wrote this introduction to Philippe Petit’s On the High Wire, which will be reissued by New Directions later this month. Photo: Michael Kerstgens/Collection Philippe Petit. I first crossed paths with Philippe Petit in 1971. I was in Paris, walking down the boulevard Montparnasse, when I came upon a large circle of people standing silently on the sidewalk. It seemed clear that something was happening inside that circle, and I wanted to know what it was. I elbowed my way past several onlookers, stood on my toes, and caught sight of a smallish young man in the center. Everything he wore was black: his shoes, his pants, his shirt, even the battered silk top hat he wore on his head. The hair jutting out from under the hat was a light red-blond, and the face below it was so pale, so devoid of color, that at first I thought he was in whiteface. The young man juggled, rode a unicycle, performed little magic tricks. He juggled rubber balls, wooden clubs, and burning torches, both standing on the ground and sitting on his one-wheeler, moving from one thing to the next without interruption. To my surprise, he did all this in silence. A chalk circle had been drawn on the sidewalk, and scrupulously keeping any of the spectators from entering that space—with a persuasive mime’s gesture—he went through his performance with such ferocity and intelligence that it was impossible to stop watching. Unlike other street performers, he did not play to the crowd. Rather, it was as if he had allowed the audience to share in the workings of his thoughts, had made us privy to some deep, inarticulate obsession within him. Yet there was nothing overtly personal about what he did. Everything was revealed metaphorically, as if at one remove, through the medium of the performance. His juggling was precise and self-involved, like some conversation he was holding with himself. He elaborated the most complex combinations, intricate mathematical patterns, arabesques of nonsensical beauty, while at the same time keeping his gestures as simple as possible. Through it all, he managed to radiate a hypnotic charm, oscillating somewhere between demon and clown. No one said a word. It was as though his silence were a command for others to be silent as well. The crowd watched, and after the performance was over, everyone put money in the hat. I realized that I had never seen anything like it before. Read More
June 3, 2019 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Kristen Arnett By Kristen Arnett In our series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. The thing about a fridge is we spend a lot of time standing in front of it wondering what’s inside. We don’t wanna necessarily open it because that will let all the cold air out, but I also like to think we stand in front of that closed door because we’re allowing ourselves to think that it holds something we truly want. Infinite possibilities. We are keeping hope alive! Read More